General Graphics Questions

Can anyone help with my text? I just made this icon and put the text on and I got that line in "future" It pops up quite often when I use text. Anyone have any ideas of how to get rid of it? I have anti alias set on smooth

Can anyone help with my text? I just made this icon and put the text on and I got that line in "future" It pops up quite often when I use text. Anyone have any ideas of how to get rid of it? I have anti alias set on smooth

that's weird. i never saw that happen. have you tested changing the size and the location of the text? or maybe it's the font?
btw, nice icon.

I have tried changing the size, angle and the font and it shows up everywhere but not all the time. :\ It's driving me crazy because I have to go in and manually smudge the lines a time a bit so there isnt the line.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone knows an easy way to choose part of an image for the purpose of brightening/lightening etc. and not make it look pixelated or gross compared to the rest of the image

i'm not sure what you're dealing with. it would help if you gave an example.
does Paint.net have layers and blending modes? if it does, you can try to use light to dark gradients with the lighter part where you want the image to be brighter and set it to soft light or something.

ETA: oh... you mean the snake in your LIMS icon? you want it brighter? well... when there's a specific element that you want to modify, it's not so difficult. you can do it with a brush. draw over the element (in a different layer) with the color you want and then play with the blending modes. i don't have a fix recipe for it, i usually play a lot with the blending and the opacity of the layers.

How do you guys cut out images, like if you want to put a person in a scene they are not in originally? What do you do about blending and such? I'm having a hard time getting the edges just right.

the best thing to do is to start with good quality images. and it's also a good thing when the light in both images are similar (images that are in the same scene or in the same photoshoot are the best), because it's not easy to fix that. also, frizzy hair doesnt's help. choose well your images and you'll get a better result.
i like to use the lasso selection tool for a start. then, for the detalis i prefer to use masks. that way, if i erase something that i shouldn't have, it's easy to fix. you don't really need the mask, it only helps you during the process. i start with a large soft brush and use a tiny one for the tiny bits. when it's done, i apply the mask.
when you want the blending to look realistic, the coloring and the lighting should match. so i choose one of the images to get the base for the coloring and then i use the coloring tools to make the other elements fit (mostly curves, and sometimes a brush).
i also think that adding a sort of glow (set to multiply) in the new element helps the blending.
and the last thing that i do is to to add a new color fill layer on top of it all. usually a skin tone set to softlight. the thing is that a new color applied to the image helps to even the coloring. it doesn't really matter what the color is. it could be a texture or a gradient.

wow! i thought it would be simple to explain. it would be easier with images as examples. maybe later. but i'm sure there are already tutorials about it somewhere. any doubts, just ask.

Ah, that doesn't sound so bad. Thank you for going through all that. I think I understand it. Thanks! I just wondered because so many of you all get such wonderfully blended (or at least wonderfully looking) images.

__________________

I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:14

What I do is I'll try to find an image where the background and the person are completely contrasted, because then i'll use the magic wand thing in photoshop to delete the background. However, sometimes, i'll also use an eraser and do it manually and add both characters in. Then I would adjust brightness, contrast and color balance so they looked similar. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by blended though. what I'll sometimes do is save the original picture background, if it's a screenshot, cut out the character and paste it in another layer. Then I could only mess around wtih the background without ruining the person.

It also helps to leave a bit of the background in from the picture you steal and erase the final bit after the transfer. Sometimes you get extremely lucky and the small area background blends into the transfered background so that you don't have sharp edges around the person you transferred in - if that makes sense. That generally can work if you pull the people from the same scene of a shoot, albeit from different caps. Although I used blur which lessens sharp edges of course, in my current avatar, the boys are actually from 3 different caps all joined together. Even before I blurred and such, the edges were barely noticeable because the background of the 3 caps was the same. All three layers of the boys have background pieces attached to them. Only Goyle's piece is funky at the top and that was merely because I got lazy - I could have easily made that blend in as well because the detail is the same (leaves).

In GIMP, I typically use the paths tool to make selections. It's an extremely powerful tool that allows for very precise selecting. (If anyone has GIMP and wants to know how to use paths, let me know )

Photoshop elements doesn't have paths, so I either do the selecting in GIMP and then copy and paste, or I do a selection with my tablet, which I'm pretty comfortable doing with precision. It's a lot harder to do with a mouse.

I don't know how to use masks though, can someone tell me how they work when making selections?